Olive Tissue Analysis

Dropped  5 samples of leaves off at a local agricultural lab for nutritional analysis.  The results of this lab will help us focus our ongoing fertilization program to give the trees just what they need and no more.  This is an important part of sustainable farming.  We want just enough nutrients, especially Nitrogen, for the tree, but not so much that we have excess running into our local watershed harming the environment.

For the samples I simply took brown paper lunch bags and pulled 40-100 leaves from a single cultivar and labeled the bag accordingly, so at the end I had one labeled bag per cultivar I wanted sampled.  The leaves wanted, I learned from the nice folks at Sunland Analytical, are a selection on the top 1/3 -2/3 of the tree from East to West, basically as the Sun traverses the tree.  This provides a good sampling of the tree from those leaves that are fully sun exposed to those leaves that are more shaded.  I took a random sampling of healthy trees throughout our fields.      

As you may know, an olive tree will have alternating heavy crop and light crop years.  What growth you have this Summer will help decide what yield you will realize come harvest 18 months away.  This years harvest has already been decided by the tree.  So our fertilization program this Summer is actually for next years harvest.  Come next Spring we want a good number of buds to decide that they have enough stores of nutrition to dedicate themselves to fruit production.  If we haven't provided that nutrition this year, a low production year will result because the tree feels starved and will dedicate itself to storing nutrition in the form of new growth.